Backscatter technology evaluation platform announced
The initial evaluation license along with a hardware/software kit, says the company, is for prospective customers to assess the company’s patented passive backscatter RF modulation and energy harvesting technology platform.
“With the release of our technology evaluation kit, we’re excited to be able to offer our partners premier access to this game-changing platform,” says Jeeva’s CEO Scott Bright. “The ability to economically connect everyday objects to the ‘Internet of Everything’ means we can help fast-moving goods manufacturers create more efficient supply chains.”
The company’s passive backscatter radio technology, says Bright, can enable battery-free, disposable sensors to provide real-time, unit-level data generated directly by products and packaging at the point of use and throughout the entire distribution path. By monitoring consumption rates and tracking inventory location and velocity, suppliers can now offer services like automated replenishment, expiration tracking, FIFO queueing, and environmental parameter monitoring.
In addition, says the company, the benefits of deploying this capability in consumable products include protection against counterfeiting and substitution and can aid in loss prevention of high value items.
In addition to the technology platform, the company announced two new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant awards – an add-on grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a newly awarded grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Aaron Parks, Jeeva Co-Founder and V.P. of Product, says, “Continued ongoing support from the National Science Foundation has been crucial to Jeeva’s story, helping us bring what started as a lab experiment all the way to commercial readiness. This new award will let us quickly ramp up a solution to some very real and specific customer needs.”
The latest NSF grant, says the company, an add-on to its ongoing Phase II SBIR award, will help it bring its technology into hospitals and health clinics in the form of inventory intelligence systems for fast-moving medical supplies such as boxes of disposable gloves, masks, tubing, and syringes. The technology will help track location, usage state, expiration date, and other parameters of inventory items, and will present key insights to operational staff to increase efficiency of procurement and re-stocking processes and will minimize waste from misplaced or expired items.
The company’s newly awarded Phase I SBIR from NASA supports the integration of precise synchronization and timestamping of distributed low-power wireless sensors. This capability, says the company, is needed by NASA for flight test and avionics equipment, although the additional features will also be more broadly applicable to the company’s core products, helping scale the size and enhance the sensing capabilities of backscatter passive radio networks used in smart supply chain systems.
Jeeva Wireless was co-founded in 2015 by two professors and three Ph.D. students from the University of Washington. Its technology, it says, will allow devices to communicate over standard wireless protocols while using 1,000 times less power than conventional radios at an order of magnitude lower cost.
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